Musings on Maths, education, teaching and technology.
Embedded below is the presentation that I will attempt in the Pecha-Kucha style on Tuesday 15th June at the Frog Learning Platforms Conference 2010.
For further information on Digital Leaders check out the following links or get in touch with me on Twitter or via the comments below.
http://www.mrstucke.com/tag/digital-leaders/
http://kristianstill.co.uk/wordpress/category/curriculum/digital-leaders/
I was honoured to be invited to Becta-X (the x stands for exchange) during the Easter break. The conference brought together 75 leading educators and 75 leading people from the Media sector. Thanks to @TomBarrett for getting me the invite – truly much appreciated.
The aims of the day were:
The way the digital media industry influences young people is both a threat and a real opportunity to education. As part of its “Fit for the Future” programme Becta has asked Just-b. Productions to independently bring together thinkers and doers from both these two worlds
We hope this participatory and distributed forum will break down walls between these two sectors, between big and small, between speaker and delegate, between real and remote participants and create fresh thinking on all sides.
I’ll not describe the entire order of events, if you want the details or indeed just the perspectives of others then please have a skim through some of these posts from other educators who were in attendance:
Fred Garnett / Tom Barrett / Doug Belshaw / Dai Barnes / Kristian Still / Nicola McNee / Ewan McIntosh
As you will see from those posts there was some discussion and reflection afterwards as to how much of a success the event was. My 2-cents worth:
Yes we have been discussing filtering, social networking, wifi etc repeatedly for the past few years. But this shows what a hindrance they still are in many schools. Slowly we are making progress in this area, the recent Ofsted report on filtering & AUPs being a prime example. Should Becta / Ofsted go further on this issue – perhaps, although whether policy is needed I’m not so sure. Everything is in place for schools to open up their filters and manage this problem with sensibly written AUPs, it is a matter of educating LAs and Head Teachers that this is the right thing to do. But remember the other 75 people in the room, many from the Media sector were surprised at the variety of filtering issues we had, I’m sure some went away with an understanding that they cannot just assume that their innocuous seeming website won’t be blocked for some educators. This can but help.
Yes we could have taken more input from the children, their wire-framing of a new website on the fly via a Skype video call was inspirational. Unfortunately and ironically technology seemed to be against that link up on that day. Perhaps next time they should be invited in person?
The biggest positive that I took from the event was the interest and connections built with the Media professionals who were present. I think that Ewan, Katz & the team really succeeded in their aim to bring together these two industries and to give us the opportunity to build these connections. It may seem like we’ve been having the conversations about filtering etc repeatedly, but isn’t that partly to do with the relatively small and dare I say it, cliquey Ed-Tech community? The majority of the Media professionals that were there were genuinely interested in finding out what was going on in schools and how we could work together in the future. Only a few were there on sales duties.
The afternoon sessions where we worked together on the 5 key questions that had been identified was probably the highlight, some great and varied minds putting their heads together was exciting stuff. Much comment has been made that 4 of the solutions were very similar. Focussing on a central, tagged, Delicious style repository of teaching ideas (credit to Kristian Still for getting this ball rolling).
I’d just like to expand on our particular question and solution about collaborating between industry and education. The question:
“What kind of partnerships between schools, digital industries and content creators (including brands) can be mutually beneficial?”
We had an entertaining discussion about educators benefiting from the skills and expertise of industry working with their pupils, of industry inspiring youngsters into their profession. I emphasised that for these partnerships to pay dividends they do have to be based around a part of the curriculum. My Head has repeatedly reminded me to make sure that our Digital Leaders project should ultimately benefit our pupils and help them towards improving their qualifications. For better or worse that is the key driver in our schools and an easy way to get projects and collaborations high level support in your school.
We finally came up with a ’solution’. A website something akin to a ‘clearing house’ where businesses from across the country could ‘advertise’ their willingness to work with schools. I think this would be an invaluable resource. At present forging those links with businesses to develop meaningful collaborations is incredibly time-consuming and needs a very dedicated member of staff to initiate it. Yet my conversations with professionals at Becta-X showed me just how many companies are eager to forge these links.
So where now? Kristian has shown how the participants can take some of these ideas and run just as Ewan hoped. However do we need the likes of Becta to also do this? I think for any of these web-based hubs of content to succeed on a national level then it will need their support and promotion. And with an election imminent, who knows if they’ll even be around to do this?
Google released their Parisian Love Story advert for the Superbowl earlier in the year – watch it, it’s ever so clever:
You can now make you own stories with 7 simple search terms. It couldn’t be easier, you just type in up to 7 search terms and then choose whether the video will show it as a normal search, image search, map search etc. Try it here: http://www.youtube.com/user/SearchStories
I knocked one up very quickly – took about 5 minutes, you’ll have to excuse the cheese factor of it!
Could be a great tool for pupils telling stories new or old, explaining topics, making revision tips, any other suggestions?
Enjoy 
Parliament Sunset by G4EGK on Flickr
First of a two part reflection on my Easter events. I recently blogged about the Progressive Education Network after they invited me to an event at the House of Commons. They subsequently invited me to a seminar led by Dylan Wiliam at the Institute of Education in London, conveniently the evening before Becta-X (see part 2 of these posts) I was pleased to be able to attend.
Dylan Wiliam is Deputy Director and Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London. Formerly of King’s College London, Dylan was a co-author of Inside the Black Box - a seminal publication on the role of assessment as a formative element in learning.
Dylan spoke passionately about improving education, why it is a national economic priority. He argued that in the current economic climate the only effective way for us to continue improving the standard of education is to improve the quality of the teaching.
His seminar was backed up with high quality data, data that is available to all of our politicians. He showed that low skilled jobs continue to vanish at an increasing pace (especially in times of recession). He showed that investment in education was money well spent, public money spent on education is efficiently translated into improved economic output.
Looking at three generations of school effectiveness research he said:
Delving more deeply into the variance of the data he showed that it doesn’t matter very much which school you go to, but it matters very much which classroom you are in. More specifically it matters which teacher you have.
One particular area of interest for me was when comparing private and state schools around the World. I had often heard that when you factor out the socio-economic differences between these schools that state schools are more often than not shown to have better teaching and better results. This often show up in Contextually Value Added scores in the UK and interests me as I work in Trafford, one of the last remaining LAs that has a Grammar School system.
Comparing State & Private Education
This slide from Dylan’s presentation compares the two after socio-economic factors have been factored in (like using CVA in the UK). I forget the exact x-axis units, forgive me. A pink bar stretching farther to the right than a purple bar shows state education out-performing private schools. Notice that the Conservative’s favourite school system in Sweden doesn’t come out too favourably here.
After concluding that the most cost-effective and time-effective way to improve our education was to improve our teaching staff we discussed CPD. CPD of the current workforce (changing entry requirements etc to the profession take a generation to filter through and have little proven effect). I asked if Dylan thought that there was time in a teacher’s year to improve their CPD. We know what a busy life filled with paperwork the average teacher has already. Dylan replied that there was time, but it is the responsibility of school leaders to make that time available. This may mean asking staff to stop doing good and effective work in order to make time for training in turn making their work even better. Something that is difficult and courageous for leadership to do. It was also argued that CPD should be directed to some degree by research findings.
Discussing CPD, Dylan stated that improving practice involves changing habits, not adding knowledge. That’s why it’s hard and takes time! We also discussed Performance Management and how we could start to divorce some of the CPD from this. Effective CPD needs to be something tailored to an individual that they have chosen to work on, not something inflicted upon them to tick a box. Dylan suggested asking every member of staff “Do you want to improve as a practitioner?” and suggested 95% would honestly answer yes, and that the rest probably need removing from post asap!
To quote his final slide:
I think these are salient points for all teachers and leaders. Also for those of us who have a habit of using technology for technology’s sake – the learning has to come first.
I was interested to meet some of the PEN and to get a better feel for their objectives. To quote them again:
Generating clear messages that build, nurture and give a real voice to a coalition of school leaders, teachers and governors is core to how Progressive Education Network will be different and distinct in its approach and work.
We believe that education and our childrens’ futures demand that we place the partnership of our frontline school leaders with government at the heart of policy making. We cannot afford a retreat to the old style politics of division and the domination of the ‘expert’ and the powerful.
There are influential figures involved with PEN who do have the ears of policy makers at Whitehall. This then had me wondering about my involvement, the words politics and policy are a little alien to me. I was not sure if it’s my place to influence these things. Well, why not? I’m not going to be out campaigning for this and that, but I do feel that future education policy needs to be considered and based on solid research and data.
I was asked towards the end how I thought PEN could engage more effectively on-line with the various communities. They are keen to have more involvement from staff on the front line and I guess a blog and Twitter network of 600+ makes me something of an ‘expert’?!
Thinking about this I’d say it’s relatively simple:
Engage with educators on Twitter: There is a PEN Twitter account, either via this, or possibly with individual members accounts, get involved in conversation – @reply people. Set up some Twitter searches on the key topics you want to discuss and get involved in those conversations. Twitter networks build quickly when you give valuable opinions back.
Encourage discussion on the PEN website. Get those survey results out and enable comments somewhere no the website. Again, encourage the conversation.
I don’t think there is any easy way for a group or company to ‘buy/promote’ there way into social media, you need to add value to people’s networks.
Scrolling through things I had starred for holiday reading, I noticed that Gapminder.org has been updated. I have blogged previously about Gapminder and the fantastic Hans Rosling, it is a fantastic tool for visualising a wealth of World data on lovely scatter graphs that animate changes through the years.
Watch one of Hans Rosling’s classic TED talks to see what it’s capable of:
There have been a number of great updates which can be seen in this diagram I’ve borrowed from Gapminder.org:
You can see the blog post detailing these on Gapminder, but to summarise: More »
The Internet I love (Image by Niffty on Flickr)
Inspired by Simon Job, this is a post about how I surf the torrential tidal wave of information that is out there on the Internet, how I filter it down into a manageable stream to consume and how I save the best bits for later.
I have been using Google Reader for the last 3 years or so to read the latest updates from my favourite websites and blogs. I have just spent about the last 4 hours tidying up my list of 400+ websites which I follow after reading an article on Lifehacker about how to declutter and streamline you google reader inbox.
I hope there are some useful tips about Google Reader, Delicious & Instapaper for newcomers to rss, and to old timers with a bulging reader like myself.
I’ve split this little guide into three sections:
I’d be fascinated to hear how you filter the Web to your liking, and whether any of this was of use to you
Simon Job has created a great little graphic to explain this process:
Using The Web
Dan Stucke, a Maths Teacher & E-Learning Director from Manchester, UK. Geek, Mountain Biker, Evertonian.
